A habit is something one does regularly without thinking. There are good habits, such as looking both ways before crossing a street, more or less benign habits, such as biting the ends of pencils, and bad habits, such as being persistently late. Photographers fall prey to all sorts of bad habits, and becoming aware of them is the first step in breaking yourself of them. From lecturing on photography, exchanging critiques with fellow members of three photography clubs, and so on, I have compiled a list of the worst of a photographer’s habits. These are the habits that beginners often find the most difficult to break and that even experienced photographers drift into more or less randomly without being conscious of them….

Royalty Free (RF)
“Free” in this context means “free of royalties (paying each time you use an image)”. It does not mean the image is free to use without purchasing a license or that the image is in the public domain.

Pay a one-time fee to use the image multiple times for multiple purposes (with limits).

No time limit on when the buyer can use an image.

No one can have exclusive rights of a Royalty-free image (the photographer can sell the image as many times as he or she wants).

A Royalty-free image usually has a limit to how many times the buyer can reproduce it. For example, a license might allow the buyer to print 500,000 brochures with the purchased image. The amount of copies made is called the print run. The buyer is required to pay a fee per brochure, usually 1 to 3 cents, for additional prints. Magazines with a large print run cannot use a standard Royalty-free license and therefore they either purchase images with a Rights-managed license or have in-house photographers.

INDIAFRICA: A Shared Future is a unique people to people initiative that aims at engaging multiple stakeholders in India and Africa through contests, fellowships, discussions, events, collaborative projects and cultural exchanges.

At StockImageBank.com India, we are constantly asking ourselves. ” What would this picture be used for? and again, more importantly,Will this image make money? The answer lies in the conceptual value of the image and its ability to be used by different clients multiple times for multiple purpose. An image of a dockyard even if it has property release may have limited use.

Tip No. 1.
75% of the images selected by our clients are SMILING. There is always a place for serious expressions, but those that have concern or gestures that communicate seriousness.

Tip No. 2 Play with different kinds of lighting . Though clean flat lighting is ok for cutouts interesting lighting always engages a creative person and attracts selection.

Tip No. 3. Stretch your concepts creatively : you must ask yourself,After doing the base shots, how can I add value by adding others elements? objects like pencils, newspaper, coins, currency, small plants, locks, watches, clocks, flags. How can you add and Indian contemporary flavour to it ?

Photography is an art and commercial photography is the art of creating images that make brands make money. India is still evolving when it comes to commercial stock photography. I will keep posting my insights to help those who want to explore and monetize their works.

I’ve never cared much for billboards. Not in the city, not out of the city — not anywhere, really. It’s like the saying in that old Five Man Electrical Band song. So when the creative director of an ad agency in Peru sent me a picture of what he claimed was the first billboard that produces potable water from air, my initial reaction was: gotta be a hoax, or at best, a gimmick.

Except it’s neither: The billboard pictured here is real, it’s located in Lima, Peru, and it produces around 100 liters of water a day (about 26 gallons) from nothing more than humidity, a basic filtration system and a little gravitational ingenuity.

Let’s talk about Lima for a moment, the largest city in Peru and the fifth largest in all of the Americas, with some 7.6 million people (closer to 9 million when you factor in the surrounding metro area). Because it sits along the southern Pacific Ocean, the humidity in the city averages 83% (it’s actually closer to 100% in the mornings). But Lima is also part of what’s called a coastal desert: It lies at the northern edge of the Atacama, the driest desert in the world, meaning the city sees perhaps half an inch of precipitation annually (Lima is the second largest desert city in the world after Cairo). Lima thus depends on drainage from the Andes as well as runoff from glacier melt — both sources on the decline because of climate change.

Enter the University of Engineering and Technology of Peru (UTEC), which was looking for something splashy to kick off its application period for 2013 enrollment. It turned to ad agency Mayo DraftFCB, which struck on the idea of a billboard that would convert Lima’s H2O-saturated air into potable water. And then they actually built one.

It’s not entirely self-sufficient, requiring electricity (it’s not clear how much) to power the five devices that comprise the billboard’s inverse osmosis filtration system, each device responsible for generating up to 20 liters. The water is then transported through small ducts to a central holding tank at the billboard’s base, where you’ll find — what else? — a water faucet. According to Mayo DraftFCB, the billboard has already produced 9,450 liters of water (about 2,500 gallons) in just three months, which it says equals the water consumption of “hundreds of families per month.” Just imagine what dozens, hundreds or even thousands of these things, strategically placed in the city itself or outlying villages, might do. And imagine what you could accomplish in any number of troubled spots around the world that need potable water with a solution like this.

MAYO DRAFTFCB / UTEC
Mayo DraftFCB says it dropped the billboard along the Pan-American Highway at kilometer marker 89.5 when summer started (in December, mind you — Lima’s south of the equator) and that it’s designed to inspire young Peruvians to study engineering at UTEC while simultaneously illustrating how advertising can be more than just an eyesore. (Done and done, I’d say.)

“We wanted future students to see how engineers can also solve social needs in daily basis kinds of situations,” said Alejandro Aponte, creative director at Mayo DraftFCB.

The city’s residents could certainly use the help. According to a 2011 The Independent piece ominously titled “The desert city in serious danger of running dry,” about 1.2 million residents of Lima lack running water entirely, depending on unregulated private-company water trucks to deliver the goods — companies that charge up to 30 soles (US $10) per cubic meter of H2O, or as The Independent notes, 20 times what more well-off residents pay for their tapwater.

Anusha has so beautifully articulated, the importance of images in a perspective that I so totally relate to. Images capture the strain of the societies we live in. They say a lot to us. All we need to to is to look. Look Deeper. Understand. Suddenly you will find yourself in that era. Besides the techniques of photography, you can interpret and explore from so many different angles. I hope you enjoyed watching it as much as I did.

ABOUT ANUSHA YADAV: Anusha Yadav is a documentary photographer based in Mumbai. She is also the Founder of Indian Memory Project — an online project that traces a personal history of India through pictures found in family archives. It aims to become India’s first open repository of a visual history made by its own people.